Stem Cell Therapies for Sensory Organ Disorders

Abstract

Sensory organ disorders, such as visual impairment, hearing loss, and olfactory dysfunction, affect a significant percentage of the population. There are no effective therapies to restore cell damage and tissue function to these sensory organs. Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have the potential to expand out to an unlimited number of cells and differentiate into any cell type of the body, and therefore have high potential to restore tissue function in transplantation stem cell therapies for sensory organ disorders. This review elaborates on the specific sensory cells for the vision, auditory, and olfactory tissues that were generated from hPSCs. It then describes the effectiveness of using hPSC-derived sensory progenitors in animal models of disease and what needs to be done next in order to progress stem cell therapies to the clinic.